Big McLargehuge
Fragile Traveler
Baseball added a 26th roster spot for covid. If conservative-as-f*** baseball can deal with temporary roster rule changes I see no reason why the NHL couldn't do something similar.
The problem here is making this work with the cap...having teams unable to ice full rosters because of being at the cap is a punishment that makes sense in normal situations, but not if a team is being forced to ice less than a full roster because of a pandemic. They're gonna have to find a way to not count a spare player or two (gotta be talking league minimum or near) or reduce restrictions when it comes to injury lists and call-ups.
I also have to imagine that increased roster size would help one other issue...getting players to/from a lot of these AHL markets is going to be a bit more difficult with there being fewer flights in general. Smaller regional airports have been hit the hardest by the reduction in flights and Avoca (WBS) is one of many small regional airports that AHL teams rely on that is handling only a couple/few flights a day, almost exclusively to hubs. Then again this is only an issue if we have an AHL season where players are called-up/sent down to, which feels like a long-shot right now.
The problem here is making this work with the cap...having teams unable to ice full rosters because of being at the cap is a punishment that makes sense in normal situations, but not if a team is being forced to ice less than a full roster because of a pandemic. They're gonna have to find a way to not count a spare player or two (gotta be talking league minimum or near) or reduce restrictions when it comes to injury lists and call-ups.
I also have to imagine that increased roster size would help one other issue...getting players to/from a lot of these AHL markets is going to be a bit more difficult with there being fewer flights in general. Smaller regional airports have been hit the hardest by the reduction in flights and Avoca (WBS) is one of many small regional airports that AHL teams rely on that is handling only a couple/few flights a day, almost exclusively to hubs. Then again this is only an issue if we have an AHL season where players are called-up/sent down to, which feels like a long-shot right now.